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Ah… here I am again … Well I recently shifted and once again its a shared accommodation (Same story different place) and once again I didn’t wanna be put up with doing a headless install on the Pi2 B. Also this time, I’d saved up a bit (skipped beer for about 3 weeks) and was feeling itchy about spending so I went up on Amazon and ordered the Pi 3. And then while I was at it – decided to get myself a monitor as well.

So after shifting into my new digs and unpacking – I decided it was time to fire up the new Pi 3 B. And behold, I dove right into the pile of the bits and bobs (the usual suspects – USB cables, flash drives, memory cards , adaptors and stuff ) and finally found an unused SanDisk 64GB Micro SD Card (Class 10) and I was elated.

So I proceed to format and flash the SD card and loaded the latest version of Raspbian from the Pi Web site. And just when I thought that the Pi3 B was now up and ready for the taking – bang, there it came up with the boot up problem. Seems like there was an issue with the Panel files in (~/.config/lxpanel/LXDE-pi). After wasting about 90 minutes, I decided to just re-flash the SD card with NOOBS.

Here are a key points to note:

If you are using an SD card upto 32GB – the Windows Disk Formatting utility allows you to format the SD card with the File Format as either NTFS or FAT32 (Most of you would already know this).

What’s interesting is that if the SD Card is larger than 32GB – then the default Formatting Options available are NTFS and exFAT – FAT32 is not supported by the Windows Disk Formatting Utility.

Now, but now NOOBS didn’t fire up and I was once again flustered. A bit of digging around led me to the fact that for NOOBS to work as a bootable CD, the SD card needs to be formatted with the FAT 32 option as the Raspberry Pi does not support exFAT.

One of the biggest advantages of the Pi3 B over the Pi2 B is the inclusion of on-board Bluetooth and WiFi support. This frees up 2 Additional USB Ports on the Pi3 B or the USB hub which I preferred as I had a couple spare lying around (Damn, I’ve got way too much stuff, I thought to myself, but hey it did come in handy and so I silenced my inner voice of reason).

So after the “sudo apt-get updated” , “sudo apt-get upgrade” and “sudo apt-get clean” and a reboot, it was time install VNC Server. But wait! – Hold the presses, this just in, the latest version of Raspbian comes with the VNC server ! Yippee!!! All you’ve gotta do is enable it from the Raspberry Pi Configuration Settings. The same goes for the SSH Interface as well.

So that’s me booted up and running the Pi3 B.

Next up on the docket is see if Bluetooth works as flawlessly as expected or whether I need to enable a few packages / install a few dependencies and stuff like that.

I’ve been using the Raspberry Pi Generation 2 Model B for over a year and half now. Trust me when I say the journey so far has been nothing short of a roller coaster ride, filled with a lot of learning, fun, enjoyment , frustration (yeah when shit doesn’t work) and the innate satisfaction that follows when you’ve cracked that nagging problem.

All this while, though, I worked on the Pi2 B without a monitor / TV (didn’t have one) and so had to start with the headless installation. Now this was particularly challenging because :

No Monitor – which means you need to SSH / Telnet into the Pi from your PC using Putty. (Thank God for Simon Tatham).

The Pi2 B does not have WiFi – however, this can be overcome by building a bridged connection from your PC

I have the New Dell XPS 15 and it did not have an Ethernet port (and I wasn’t feeling too rich to spend on a Dell Thunderbolt hub).

Instead I got a Netgear PR200 N300 Trek and used it as WiFi Extender / Hotspot and connected the Pi2 B via Ethernet cable and it worked like a charm! (I could of-course connect the Pi 2 B to the home router – however due to my shared accommodation situation and a bit of a nagging Room-mate – I decided the above approach was much less stressful).

The Pi is really a gift to this generation! the computing capabilities, it offers are immense and great tool for anyone with a hunger to learn and tinker around.

Not to mention, if you cannot afford to buy a Wireless network drive, but really wanted one, you could just build yourself a Low Powered Network Storage Drive using the Pi – all you need is the Pi, an Internet connection and any spare flash drive or USB hardrives you already have.

Some might say that the Pi has its limitations – with ARM architecture, you cannot install a few big applications /software (Oracle Database being one) , but you need to understand is that the Pi wasn’t built to please the power hungry , capacity hogging, heavy configuration giants. It was built to please those who wanted to do a lot but with very little !

So, come on, get your feet wet, your hands dirty with some programming and fun and you have a world to explore.

Has it ever happened to you – that you’ve requested a piece of information from your colleague, manager, client, etc and they’ve just sent you a screen grab (an image ) of the piece of information.

Now if the requested information is large or has data with numbers, then this just only increases the task of you having to manually type down each piece of information / number and double or even triple check to ensure that you’ve not missed out anything or incorrectly typed / transposed the digits / characters. And there you are at your wits ends – (of course you could once again ask for the data to be sent in a required format – however that may put you in an awkward position). At such times you just wish you were simply able to copy & paste the data from the screen grab (image ) – this would make life so much easy. Well – this is where OCR – comes into play.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) – as defined on Wikipedia is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. To put it in layman terms – the ability to copy typewritten or printed text from images and then be able to paste it into any other application like word, excel, email clients etc.

Now there are various software available in the market / online which provide OCR – however you will have to buy these and then there is always the cost factor.

Here is where the Microsoft® OneNote® comes in handy. Bundled as part of the Microsoft Office Suite, this is an extremely power packed tool for note taking, collaboration and collating data.

Amongst the various features available with OneNote – its OCR feature “Copy Text From Picture” is fantastic.

Again, the field of OCR is an evolving one and hence at times depending on the Font of the text or the clarity of the character in the image file – an “O” could be replaced with a “0”, an “l” for a “1” and so on and so forth. No system is perfect and OneNote does get a majority of the work done.

The second key feature of OneNote that impressed me a lot and one which I use so frequently is its ability to take screen grabs aka the Print-Screen function.

This feature can be activated by starting up One-Note and then Clicking the Windows Key()and S.

The moment you do this the Screen is covered by a transparent layer and a cross-hair (+) is displayed. Then all you do is keeping the left mouse key pressed – you drag the cross-hair (+) to select the part of screen which you want to Grab. The moment you release the left mouse key – it takes a snapshot of the screen over which you have dragged the cross-hair.

If you are doing this for the very first time – then OneNote gives a pop-up window asking you the section/book into which you want to save the screen grab or do you want to just keep it on the system clipboard and then make the image available to be inserted (pasted) into any word/ excel / rich text editor / email editor etc.

I’ve been told that I’m a nerd, a geek, a techie – be it issues with the office PC’s / Laptops, phones, you name it.

You’d perhaps be wondering whats with the blog name or the domain.

To be honest it started off as mere joke a few weeks back – being referred as “Technology Baba” while I was sharing my views on some discussion over mobile phones “giving gyan” as they called it – .And as a wild fire spreads – this Tag Stuck on in the office and among friends.

So here it goes – Finally – the Very First Post from “Technology Baba”.

The purpose of this blog is to share tid-bits, tips n tricks which would be handy for the various day to day software we use.

Through this blog or website – I would be featuring plug-ins , add-ins , utilities for the most commonly used tools like Word, Excel, Power-point etc.

And if you would like an add-in / plug-in developed, it would be a great opportunity for me to do this for you and at “No Cost!!!”

So do share this blog post as much as you can –

So once again Welcome!!!

Techno-stu!!!

P.S.: A very special thanks to Dinesh Makhija for the nick-name and Amit Bakshi for a huge amount of coaxing which led me to eventually start this blog!